Internet bosses often sought to absolve themselves of responsibility for this inequity by presenting it as a free-market transaction. But that was not true. The internet was no longer something one could take or leave. The problem was not that a new public square had been created but that the old public square had been destroyed. The bookstore where you could go if you didn’t like shopping at Amazon was no longer there. The social gatherings for high school girls bored with Facebook, or for high school boys who didn’t feel like strapping on headphones and shooting people in virtual reality
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